Situation
What was happening
Two businesses had merged. I took commercial ownership of the combined organisation: six markets across Europe and Latin America, four business units, 25 people and a commercial P&L in the tens of millions.
The business was not growing. Combined commission had risen in low single digits for two consecutive years, and the first half of my first year was down 11% year on year. Every senior manager in the merged structure had come from one side of the merger. The other side had noticed, and said so privately to anyone who asked.
Problem
Why the commercial model was struggling
There was no shortage of strategy. What was missing was the machinery underneath it, and any shared view of reality between the two halves of the business.
- Almost no commercial process. What existed was inherited from one side and not practised on the other
- Reporting that nobody used. Figures existed, but they were not the ones the commercial team needed, they were rarely looked at, and little had been done to show people how to act on them
- Relationships had been outsourced. Most partners were being monetised through a third party agency, which left the team with little real influence over growth
- Line management conflict. In several markets there was genuine, unresolved friction between people and their managers
- A cultural imbalance nobody would name. One side felt smaller, imposed upon, and that its ways of working had been made irrelevant
Diagnosis
What I found
I changed nothing for the first stretch. I sat with every team lead across all six markets and asked the same questions of each, so that the disagreements between markets stayed visible rather than being averaged into a summary.
Three findings came back consistently, and in that consistency was the answer. The commercial problem was not a market problem or a product problem. It was that the organisation could not see itself, had lost direct contact with the customers who generated its revenue, and was carrying an unspoken status conflict that made every operational disagreement into a proxy war.
How can you be in sales and not look at your own figures every week? Everything else in the plan followed from the answer to that.
Actions
What changed, in the order it changed
Listened before changing anything
Every team lead across all six markets, individually, with the same questions. No decisions taken during this period, deliberately.
Fixed reporting first
Rebuilt the dashboards around what the commercial team actually needed to decide with, and set the weekly rhythm of looking at them, which brought this side of the business level with the other. Nothing else can be diagnosed until people use their own numbers, and nothing afterwards can be proved without a baseline.
Restored direct client contact
Set explicit standards: a minimum of three networks and ten clients per account manager, direct brand relationships instead of agency mediated ones, and quarterly business reviews the client attended rather than received.
Then the culture, which was the actual problem
I was straightforward that the senior appointments had gone one way and why, and built the reassurance that this was about growth rather than about which side had won. That conversation was only possible once the first three steps had produced visible evidence.
Built the system
Organisational design with named roles, a prioritised initiative plan across business units with owners and mechanisms, rate cards, forecasting and a weekly and monthly cadence.
Results
What it produced
+20%
Fourth quarter of year one, against the prior year
5 of 6
Markets growing double digits by that quarter
+44%
Combined commission the following year
~2x
Managed account gross merchandise value
By market, the following year: the strongest grew 153% in commission and 243% in gross merchandise value, achieved by restructuring it under an existing team in a neighbouring country rather than building a separate local operation. The market that had declined 19% the previous year grew 93%. The remaining four grew 45%, 43%, 29% and 14%.
The number that hid the turn
The full first year read as modest growth, and on an annual view nothing appeared to have happened. The half yearly shape tells the real story: down 11% in the first half, up over 14% in the second, up more than 20% in the fourth quarter. I nearly missed it myself, because I was reading annual totals like everyone else. Averages describe size well and direction badly.
What it cost
A small number of people left, on both fit and performance grounds, handled quickly and without leaving a legal problem behind. Integrations cost people, and a case study that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.
The engagement described here is the shape of the work I now do independently as an interim commercial director.
Questions
Common questions
How long did the turnaround take?
The visible turn happened within roughly two quarters of arrival. The structural work that made it durable, including organisational design and operating cadence, continued through the following year.
What was the single most important action?
Rebuilding reporting. It was the least glamorous item on the list and the reason everything after it worked, because it created both the shared reality the two merged halves needed and the baseline that made the improvement provable.